Case Studies

Global Portal Application Enhancements Saves Millions in Support Costs, Improves Customer Satisfaction

Project At a Glance

RDA worked jointly with a leading software developer to maintain and enhance a mission-critical, worldwide consumer support application to meet increasing business demands. We also modernized the development environment to simplify future maintenance. The Customer Assistance Portal saves the business over six million dollars annually by reducing support costs and creating other revenue opportunities through support channels.

About Our Client

RDA's client is a leading software developer whose divisions focus on platform products and services, business, and entertainment and devices.

 

Background

Our client's Customer Assistance Portal (CAP) is a highly complex, multi-tier incident management platform and call center application that supports over 12,000 field agents for a gamut of products.

The RDA project team partnered with our client to enhance the system, enabling it to meet increasing business demands, and modernized the development environment to simplify future maintenance activities.

The CAP team is a multi-organizational, cross-functional team. At the time of this project, RDA was a primary vendor, partnering with our client and other vendor organizations to develop and maintain the system.

 

Solution Detail

At the beginning of this project, the CAP system had been in service for almost five years and was operating with a legacy architecture and using a legacy development environment. The CAP team was responsible for making short-term improvements to the system that allowed it to keep up with the increasing demands of the business as new supported products and lines of business were onboarded to CAP.  Also, as CAP is a 24/7 mission-critical system, the CAP team was responsible for emergency response to high-priority escalations.  To continue meeting the needs of a growing and changing business, the CAP team also provided functional enhancements to CAP to keep the system relevant until a newer system independent of CAP could be brought online.

Approximately nine months after RDA’s involvement in CAP, our client turned leadership of the program over to RDA.  Prior to that, system development was primarily accomplished using text editors.  RDA modernized the development environment to support Visual Studio as the primary development tool.  RDA also introduced a navigation framework into the CAP WinForm client to maximize re-use of existing client components and to make their integration of cohesive user workflows quicker and easier.  RDA also made some improvements to the business logic that resided in database stored procedures to make it more scalable and to enhance performance in anticipation of increased activity over the upcoming holiday season.  In addition, RDA made significant improvements to some of the business automation components of the system to ensure that they were functioning consistently with the business expectations.

After these efforts, RDA successfully transitioned CAP project leadership back to our client and continued to serve as a key partner that provided system expertise for our client in the program management, software development and software test disciplines. RDA assisted our client with sustained engineering, architectural improvements, feature development and the onboarding of new lines of business for CAP.

Such was the success of CAP that commercial lines of business began to use CAP as well. The Software Plus Services (S+S) business began the onboarding process to CAP as one of the first major commercial lines of business.

 

Benefits

CAP is not only a software system; it’s also an ongoing program to provide technology to our client's consumer support business.  The average ROI for each new feature in CAP is hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.  On average, at least one major feature and a few minor ones are released approximately every 10 weeks.  By very rough estimates, CAP saves the business over six million dollars annually by reducing support costs and creating other revenue opportunities through support channels.

Additionally, architectural improvements made by both RDA and our client collectively have greatly increased the capacity of the system.  Originally, CAP was designed to accumulate a maximum of 100,000 new support incidents per day, in addition to the associated transactions on existing support incidents.  Thanks to performance improvements made by the CAP team, CAP was tested to safely accommodate roughly 250% of that amount. This enables increased activity for existing lines of business using CAP, as well as the opportunity to onboard new lines of business.

 

Technically Speaking

CAP integrates many different components and systems to provide a single point of aggregation for supporting customers. The following diagram provides a simplified view of CAP’s architecture:

CAP’s support platform consists of a series of Web services that expose business objects, backed by a failover cluster of SQL Server 2005 database servers.  The Web services and code are written in C# 2.0.

The CAP client is a Winform 2.0 client written in C# which accesses the support platform Web services. The services are often referred to as “gateways,” though this is a misnomer according to enterprise software patterns which place a gateway component at the client instead of the server.

Several partner systems also consume CAP’s Web services in a similar fashion as the client: searching customer accounts, retrieving customer details and managing service requests.

Partner tools are integrated directly with the CAP client and are developed and maintained by various teams.  The CAP client often provides specific data required by a partner tool regarding a particular customer or service request and subsequently launches an application.

Integration systems represent various other elements within the consumer support space maintained independently of CAP.  These systems are typically responsible for managing a particular type data for a given line of business, such as subscriptions, product entitlement, or order management.

Automation servers maintained by CAP host various scheduled tasks responsible for repetitive activities, such as processing business rules on aged data, sending emails, and purging old data from the database.

The various databases for CAP are hosted on different server clusters.  The primary database for CAP, SupportDB, sits on its own cluster and contains data related to service requests and business-defined metadata.  Other databases contain some customer data for specific lines of business, diagnostics traces, events from external systems, and security audit data.